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Customers-Suck and Service Wank
January 2012: This wank began with a slap at some of the OPs in LJ's Customers_Suck community: Half the people who post to that comm sound like they shouldn't even be in a job... The very first response lamented : the tyranny of making the customer the centre of the universe. So many customers deluded into thinking that they should have their every whim and complaint immediately catered to by service staff. Surprisingly, the "go start your own business" libertarian reply did not provoke an avalanche of wank. What did was the exchange starting here over whether customer assholery is a bigger factor than service staff who are "absolute shit at their jobs," the latter voiced by someone who worked all levels of restaurant service for a decade, "everywhere from hostess/busser to GM manager." Countrywank was introduced by a reply to that person: : Anyone who expects the person behind the till or the serving tray to be pleasant and grovelly to demanding customers has unreasonable expectations. I'm so glad I live in a country where everyone acknowledges it's a shit job. The service veteran explained that misanthropes shouldn't be in jobs that involve the selling of the restaurant "experience" to customers. The anon she was responding to replied, : I don't want to have an 'experience' doing any of that, especially shopping. I want to do it in my own time without the people bugging me. ...This is why our managers used to get in fights with Head Office, because 'good customer service' in America translates to 'Love, your staff look fucking psychotic' in Northern Ireland. That led to tipping wank: Well, if you're not pleasant or you're just a plain asshole, then I'm not fucking going to tip you. And this comes from somebody working their summers as a waitress. A non-U.S. anon retorted that waitstaff don't have to "fake a maniac sic episode" if they live in countries in which they're paid living wages. A subsequent commenter complained that anti-servility anons were comparing service to "forced prostitution." As it turned out, they were misrecalling an earlier comment caricaturing the pro-customer argument as "Staff must drop to their knees and fellate customers to keep them happy" and the pro-server argument as "It's an imposition to expect me to treat customers with any more joy than I'd greet a boil on my ass." A bartender threw in here, here, and here to opine that she is not only entitled but obliged to bounce abusive customers. Replies to her third comment, even from the service veteran, acknowledged that the entire thread seems to be lacking in nuance. The service veteran went on to describe in detail the types of slackers she's worked with and to insist that servers should, indeed, "cater to" customers' "every whim and complaint." This touched off a long-ish thread on the definitions of "cater," "whim," and "complaint"; as well as the difference between reasonable and unreasonable whims and complaints. An entirely separate thread by a food service worker, about sexual harassment and racism from customers, led to yet more wank over the term "whim." Category:Wank in the House